Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday June 07, 2010 @10:35AM
from the someone-alert-dawkins dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan takes a humorous look at six 'sects' of fanatical tech loyalists. 'Fandom, devotion, obsession — certain technologies have a way of inspiring an extremely loyal following. So committed are these devotees, you might as well call them technology cults,' Tynan writes in this update to last year's list, which included fans of the Newton, Commodore, and Ruby on Rails, among other technologies. 'Sometimes these cults are inspired by elegant lines of code. Other times it's dedication to an ideal. Some are looking to transform the way software is made. Others hope to transform humanity itself. And some just want to argue about it all — endlessly and at great length.'"

That is why the ordering of threads should be done using more logical criteria, such as the most gratuitous use of the word floccinauccinilihilipilification* in a serious screenplay. *Ok, this should be a different and somewhat shorter f-word, but this seems so much better somehow.

To be fair to the Jobsian cult, though, the most rabid extremists I've ever come across are old-skool SGI admins. Don't even try to suggest putting Linux on ancient SGI hardware; according to sacred lore, it will turn a venerable super computer into a PC. Then they'll send you an angry email as well, just to make sure the point gets across.

SGI might not have had the best marketing but back in the day it had some of the best hardware designers and OS/driver writers in the world as far as graphics was concerned. What they didn't know at the time wasn't worth knowing. I'd be pretty amazed if Linux could get the same performance out of the hardware even if it used SGI written drivers.

Probably, but although SGI hardware is readily available and even cheap for the enthusiast, Irix is not. It's actually not easy to get hold of, and SGI isn't helpful at all. So to make use of the fancy old hardware (SGI made nice boxes years before Apple), people tend to be attracted to the alternatives: NetBSD and Linux. An Indy can either be a fancy but inefficient dust collecting device, or a low-end Unix terminal running Linux/BSD. Architecturally, it can't really be a PC. But considering that SGI aband

You should have listened to the tirade I got from EnterpriseDB (the Windows vendor for PostgreSQL). Because I need to do stuff too heavy for MySQL (and I don't like the problems Oracle has caused, nor the splintering), I'm increasingly interested in Ingres and other Open Source DBs.

You just reminded me of a Usenet post I made in the mid 90's asking a technical question about OpenGL. This was when SGI owned 3d graphics and openly scorned the presumption of a PC ever rivaling them. Something about my question made it PC-specific and they flamed me like a heretic.

Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the PalmTech cult No. 2: Brotherhood of the RubyTech cult No. 3: The Ubuntu tribeTech cult No. 4: The CommodoriansTech cult No. 5: The Order of the LispTech cult No. 6: Monks of the MidrangeTech cult No. 7: The Tao of Newton

It kind of irked me that the 'Commodorians' section droned on and on about the Commodore 64, whose enthusiasts are pretty much a group of modest hobbyists with a realistic view of the world, then only mentioned the real nutcase cultists, the Amiga cranks, at the end like an afterthought. Maybe it was viewed as too dangerous to bring up 'the A computer' prominently.

(And probably an Amiga crank or two will respond to this comment, or have one of their friends tag it flamebait.)

Oh heavens I fit into a few of those categories.I think they left out a few.What of NetBeans vs Eclipse.org?The anti Monoites. Those that hate all things Mono and C# like that pollutes the purity of Linux.The Church of TheoThe Brotherhood of St Clive of Sinclair.The Flash haters which now seem to be having issues that Apple has joined them since many are also Apple haters.The Flash faitful or those poor fools that that don't understand that the only reason people keep Flash is Farmville.And the Twitteroti.

Seriously, it doesn't. Snydeq is their PR flack, and he's got a weekly slashdot quota (check out his submission history). Quality of article doesn't matter, he just has to hit his numbers. Hey, it's a living, right...?

Android? Don't you mean iPhone? Android just hit the mainstream, but people are still fawning over the iPhone despite serious problems with the way that Apple handles things and the fact that it seems to be losing ground at present tot he competition.

The things you rescue from dragons/demons/flame-breathing-spike turtles in old video games.Highly sought after by males, regardless of economic, social, or intellectual status (some groups are exceptions).Often pleasant to look at.

Right. But note that the linked article is pre-release hype. Windows 3.0 was going to be good. I saw even worse hype for Google's ChromeOS even before it was officially announced, though. Not by fanboys, but by "journalists" trying to sell "news" by making it up. It's just an attempt at drumming up enthusiasm for "the next big thing" so that readers will be want to read more about it later.

No, we upgraded to the C=128D. Actually, I've used and owned both. The 128D may be the best 8-bit computer of all time, and I say that because it was, essentially, almost every 8-bit computer that came before it, all rolled into one.

I’d actually argue that the Commodore 128, Commodore 65 and CBM-II series were all mediocre successors to the Commodore 8-bit line at best. I even suspect that had the Amiga not fallen into Commodore’s lap, they might have gone bankrupt because of it.

The main problem with all three systems was their CPU. The MOS 8502 found in the C128 and CBM-II as well as the CSG 4510 in the C65 could only access 64KB of memory directly, so they all relied on bank switching to get around the limitation. Bank switching SUCKS. It is even worse than the 20-bit segmentation model found in the i8086/8088.

Apple ended up using the WDC 65816, which included a limited set of op-codes that could handle 24-bit “long mode” addresses. But it was a bolt on feature at best, and was severely limited. A better option would have been if the MOS 8502 came with a new memory mode where all existing 16-bit ($xxxx) ops could have been extended to 24-bit ($xxxxxx) instead. A processor with a flat 24-bit memory mode would have been very easy to work with.

All of the C128’s other major faults (graphics and audio) are all secondary. Sure, had they either adopted the MOS 7360’s 121-color Y/C palette or a 64-color RGB6 palette, it would have been great. Had they adopted stereo SID and/or added frequency modulation, it would have been great. But in the end, the processor would have crippled it. Just try programming for the C65 emulator under M.E.S.S. and see for yourself.

What seems silly to me is including C64 users as a cult and only jokingly mentioning Amiga advocates in an aside. Hard to believe any tech observer including the former instead of the latter. Diehard AmigaOS advocates much more deserve "cult" status.

I'm old enough to remember when the Commodore 64 came out. I owned one. I had bunches of friends who owned one. We loved them.

The article says this:

Their most sacred relic: the Commodore 65, an improved version of the C64 that never made it past the prototype stage.

Um...no. The C65 is not a sacred relic. That's asinine. It was never even released. The mere mention of the C65 in the article is foolish. It was the Commodore 64 we loved and revered, not the vaporous C65.

Yes it is, please check comp.sys.cbm or any Commodore-forum before you try to sound as if you have any idea what you're talking about. There is nothing as sought after as a C65 among Commodore-collectors - not even the Commodore MAX. Last year I offered around US$2000 for one of them, but unfortunately the seller wanted more. Latest C65 on ebay (dec. 2009) went for around US$7800.

I agree! We Amigans are definitely a cult. I LOL'd when I read this: "These are people who worship the Commodore Amiga operating system and expect that one day its superiority will cause it to rise again. Some of them are really annoyingly crazy."

That should be our new motto: It's superiority will cause it to rise again!

The AmigaOS was literally the last OS I actually loved, and that love came at a price: I had to watch an inferior operating system trundle forward clumsily, finally taking on many of the best aspects of the AmigaOS, but doing so very tentatively, awkwardly, or downright poorly.

But I'm a realist and a rationalist: The Last Chance for the Amiga was for a well-managed company to take it over. Escom bought it, and I suspect that even by that time, it

I disagree. I would actually suggest that Carnegie Mellon’s Mach was the best kernel of the time.

The majority of AmigaOS’s faults come from two issues: the use of TRIPOS rather than CAOS for AmigaDOS and the lack of better memory management. Although some might point out that those two are the same issue.

Programming in C for the Amiga back in the Kickstart 1.x days was a little rough with AmigaDOS. Once you learned how to program for Exec, you had to relearn how to program for AmigaDOS

I do think that if Commodore had used Concurrent for the OS of the Amiga things would have gone better.Truth is a huge amount of it was just marketing. Commodore never got the press it deserved of the developer attention. One simple reason is that no PC magazine could risk giving good coverage to the Amiga.Think about the Amiga compared to a PC of the time. Dos was single tasking, limited to 33MB hard drives and offered NO memory protection as well.Graphics? You had to write code for every graphics card on

Having worked both at Amiga and at ESCOM's Amiga Technologies spinoff, I do think that was the last real chance the Amiga had. They actually took their time to study the problem, enlisted me and Andy Finkel to run hardware and software development groups, respectively, and had the right idea about how many people and how much time this was going to take, the right place in the market for new Amigas, etc. No guarantees... as I said, it was a chance.

Yes, finally a cult that I belong to.
At least off and on.
And got in on fairly early (66650).
I am, however, disappointed that neither article lists the cult of APL.
Now, there's a proper group of fanatics.
And I can say that, since I'm one of them.

Yeah, I think TMTOWTDI might be a big part of the "problem" that prevents perl from becoming a cult. Another, which sorta surprised me when it started happening to me, is that there are a lot of companies that actually look for "perl" on resumes (and think it's a good thing;-). When I first learned perl back in the early 90s, I never thought it would ever help me get a job; I just thought it looked like something practical. When people started using it and saying how useful it was, I was afraid for a wh

I cordially loathe Perl. it is a grotesque collection of shell tools held together with gaffer tape. However, I must admit it is one of only two of the many languages I have used where I learned it from a book from scratch and did a useful medium-sized job in the same day. Most languages are good for something. I have even found a job that Prolog was absolutely perfect for (I have never found a second example, but every dog has its day). And yet...

Oh, but they did! They just posted the wrong link to an out-dated article. Here's the actual article [infoworld.com] from infoworld (print version) with...6 cults. We (collectively, Slashdot) made #1, which seems astute enough.

Holy scriptures: The Lord of the Rings; Programming Perl (aka "The Camel Book")

On initial reading, I thought I was reading something about Neo-Tech (an Scientology-like offshoot of Objectivism), which would be decidedly more serious and sinister than the fairly harmless fanboyism discussed heretofore. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet on this story.

Did the tests for the first cults except apple,I only eat apples not compute on them. Linux 16, Programming 14, and ho surprise, windows 17, I was so certain I was gonna suck on that... I guess some scars from windows admining just don't heal.

People in real cults wear sneakers, chop their genitals off and commit suicide. People who like Newtons/Ruby on Rails/Linux/Macs/whatever to a level disparate with the rest of society are called enthusiasts.

Only 6? And why those 6? The ones they pick seem like a subset I might have picked in the early 2000s. I'd be surprised if there are more than, oh, 5 working Newtons out there, and Palm is pretty damn dead, still. Palm, if anything, should only make the list because of a lack of backward compatibility/application support elsewhere.

How about:

* Apple (wanton consumerism and bling?)* Ubuntu (obviously they picked wisely on this one; there are quite a few people who cling to their Ubuntu as bad as the Apple peo

I agree with most of them, though I'd personally replace "Silverlight" with "HTML5". I haven't seen too many people extol the virtues of Silverlight; on the other hand, I've run across more than a few people that swear that HTML5 will solve all of their problems, banish heretics (Flash, Silverlight, etc.), cure cancer, and so on. Of course, I am using the HTML5 YouTube beta, so I have nothing against the protocol; I'm just saying, let's wait for the standard to get finished and wait for some decent HTML5-ca

When the Commodore 64 came out, it wasn't cheap either. $595 was a lot of money in 1982.

I stand corrected on the production dates. In the US, at least, there wasn't much happening by the late 1980s. I worked at a video game company from 1987-1989 and C-64 games were on the way out.

The C-64 was a nice machine for its time, certainly cost effective in its later years. I just am dubious that it has a "cult" at this point that remotely compares to the Amiga one. Mostly because the C-64 is obsolete in every wa

"Tech consultant Jamie Wells says a client he works for still uses OS/2 to run its homegrown ERP and CRM systems, only instead of PCs they run it virtualized on Mac Minis."

Please tell me you're joking. If I were brought in to work on a system like this, I'd run away screaming.

Most hypervisors have pretty shoddy OS/2 support. The latest versions of VMWare dropped it, I don't know if it works on Parallels. It does work on VirtualPC, but that's Windows only now, so no luck on the Mac-Mini....unless you're d

So what's this article doing under "hardware"? All of the so-called "cults" in both articles are centered around specific software. And scanning the discussion supports this, since "hardware" is a relatively rare string in the rapidly growing page.

Is there a clean way with the/. software to unobtrusively reclassify an article and its discussion? Though I suppose we don't have a "cult" classification. Maybe we should.

While I suspect you are just trying to hit as broadly as possible with your trolling (and trolling Windows could risk to actually dilute your troll), is there a desktop OS and mobile OS you prefer personally? Windows/Windows Mobile?

This is a good question. I was a Gentoo user for years, contributed code, etc., but things got chaotic and stuff broke too much for it to be useful anymore. You hardly ever hear about it now. What happened to all the Gentoo users?

They must have gone somewhere, but I don't see Ubuntu. Ubuntu is all about the ease of use, and bringing Linux to the masses. Gentoo compiled every package from source as it installed them for Gods' sake. I thought about installing it once, then thought "You know the last time you had to recompile X11 from source, it took three hours. That was years ago, when it was much smaller, and that's just one package in Gentoo." Then I downloaded whatever Red Hat or Fedora was current at the time.